Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/199

Rh business, stole into his Eden. He was invited and consented to act as chairman of a Royal Commission on the coalfields of Victoria, and soon after he had discharged this function he was appointed a member of the Commission to which was entrusted the onerous and difficult task of choosing a site for the future federal capital of Australia. These duties involved much travelling, as well as much critical weighing of evidence, but in spite of all distractions he made steady progress with the revision and completion of his life-long researches in Australian ethnology. By the summer of 1904 the work was so far advanced that he came to England with his daughter, Miss Mary E. B. Howitt, to see his book through the press. It was then that I had the privilege of making his personal acquaintance. I hastened to greet him in London soon after his arrival, and learned to esteem as a man one whom I had long respected as an anthropologist. Later in the summer, in the month of August, he and his daughter did me the honour of staying for some days in my house at Cambridge to attend the meeting of the British Association. He read a paper "On Group Marriage in Australian Tribes" at the meeting, and the University of Cambridge showed its high appreciation of his services to science by conferring the honorary degree of Doctor of Science upon him. I shall always cherish the memory of his visit and of the conversations we had on the topics in which we both took a deep interest. Later in the autumn he left England for Australia, spending some time happily in Italy by the way, and there meeting once more a sister whom he had not seen for more than fifty years. Before the end of the same year (1904) the book by which he will always be chiefly remembered was published under the title of The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. The value and importance of the work are too well known to call for any detailed appreciation or eulogium. It must always remain an anthropological